Free Food!
Who wouldn’t want to live in a carefree food forest where little work is required, and delicious fruit and nuts are abundant? A Garden of Eden, right? Believe it or not, Gardens of Eden do exist in real life and we can easily plant them in our back yards or as entire orchards.
A Garden of Eden would be based on plants that work together to form a synergistic web of life. Different heights, plant functions,root structures, and countless other intricacies and dependencies have evolved in native forests to make plant partnerships (or guilds) that have withstood the test of time. These guilds don’t require outside fertilizers or care and they provide food year after year after year, just like a native forest.
It’s Hard Work to Re-Invent the Wheel… So Don’t Try!
Passionfruit is delicious, has an incredible tropical flower, and is the host plant for many butterflies.
I’ve tried my hand at designing guilds to make food forests. To make a guild, I place plants together that I think would help each other. I first pick a canopy (or overstory), and then a sub-canopy (or understory) and some shade-tolerant bushes. One third to one half of my trees/bushes/plants are nitrogen fixers for natural fertilization. I make sure to choose vegetation with different root structures and of course we need a ground cover. I add vines for good measure.
That is a lot to remember! I have read dozens of books, spent long hours on the internet and have 28 years of farming experience. I’ve spent much time agonizing over whether or not these guilds were going to work because there is no guarantee. There is just the enticing promise of knowing that if it does, it will be spectacular.
After hundreds of hours of researching, memorizing, and racking my brain, I realized that I have the recipe built into my climate and soil if I simply pay attention. If let my pastures go without grazing or mowing them, natural succession would eventually move them to the final stage of an Oak-Hickory forest. Hmmmm. Hickory nuts are edible, and acorns can be processed into flour! Free food, no work. Better yet, pecans are in the hickory family and chestnuts are in the oak family. Both are native to this forest, and both are delicious. How amazing is that? What other food is in this forest? What if I sped up succession and planted an orchard that used the same species that would naturally grow here? Instant foolproof food forest! Eureka!
Follow Nature! All the Work is Already Done!
Patterning an orchard based on an existing Garden of Eden makes all the sense in the world. It is the holy grail of designing a food forest because success is guaranteed, or at least a lot more likely. We are following the well-worn path of nature instead of trying to blaze our own trail and getting lost.
Both Asian (left) and Native (right) persimmons are delectable treats.
The Oak-Hickory ecosystem is the largest deciduous forest ecosystem in the Southern and Central United States. It feeds kajillions of animals every year, and has helped keep human inhabitants fed for millennia. This Oak-Hickory forest runs North-South from Rhode Island to northern Georgia and East-West from South Carolina to Ohio with scattered patches elsewhere in the US and Canada.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources has a listing of South Carolina ecosystems called The Natural Communities of South Carolina Initial Classification and Description by John B. Nelson. It’s not an easy read. The first time I picked it up, I put it right back down after finding that our Oak-Hickory forest was a long dry list of Latin names. I know some Latin names from my interest in gardening, but in general it’s not my first choice of languages.
After hearing several people lament that they wanted a guild for a food forest that they knew would work, I put on my big-girl britches and decided to decode the gibberish into something usable. I took the Latin names, translated them, and then looked for the benefits of each species. A surprising majority had delicious fruit/nuts. Not every plant in the guild is useful for food, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be included in your yard or orchard. Many of the plants are good for wildlife, and/or are simply beautiful with mysterious ties to the rest of nature that we can’t even fathom.
Foolproof Fruit!
Pawpaws are a delightful, unique fruit you can easily grow. Make sure you have two cultivars so they can pollinate each other.
The fruit of my labor is in the table below. My mouth waters at the thought of pecans, blueberries, highbush cranberries, pawpaws, persimmons and grapes. Truly, a real Garden of Eden.
I have planted over 300 trees following this recipe, and am starting to reap the rewards. The best part is that I have lost very few plants, even in drought years.
I look forward to many more years of wandering around eating fruit all year.
I hope you enjoy salivating over the possibilities in the table below. You may even be tempted to change your name to Adam or Eve! Happy Planting!
Oak-Hickory Forest Guild Members
Common Name |
Latin Genus |
Kirsten’s Use/Notes |
Overstory |
||
| Oak | Quercus | Flour from acorns, lumber, one of the best wildlife trees |
| Chestnut* | Castanea | Chestnuts were not found in my Oak-Hickory research, but chestnuts are in the same family as oaks. Oaks took over after Chestnut blight killed all of the Chestnuts in the East. Chinese chestnuts that are not susceptible to chestnut blight are commonly grown in Piedmont soils. Delicious edible nut. |
| Hickory | Carya | Most are delicious, but the nut meats are difficult to extract unless you boil them. |
| Pecan* | Carya | While not included in my literature search as a part of the Oak-Hickory forest, pecan is in the same Carya genus an is native to the Southeast US. Delicious edible nut. |
| Red Maple | Acer rubrum | Seeds are edible, but can be bitter |
| Tulip Poplar or Tulip Tree or Yellow Poplar | Liriodendron tulipifera | Great pollinator attractor. One of the best trees for honey bees. |
| Pine | Pinus | Wildlife habitat and food. I have tried to grow Korean pines for pine nuts, but they did not do well in the Oak-Hickory system. Other pines used for pine nuts in the US are primarily from the Southwest, so again, are not native to this region. Native pines include white pines, which do not have a readily available, delicious nut. |
| Tupelo | Nyssa Sylvatica | Excellent pollinator attractor. Fruit eaten by birds |
| Black Locust | Robinia pseudoacacia | Nitrogen fixer, goat/cow forage when coppiced, excellent nectary, delicious flower |
| Persimmon* | Diospyros virginiana | It is not widespread throughout the entire Oak-Hickory area, but in the southern and Mississippi Oak-Hickory areas it bears a delicious fruit with unrivaled sweetness when fully ripe. Asian cultivars are also delicious, with larger fruit and better shelf-life. Some varieties are even non-astringent. |
Understory |
||
| Sourwood | Oxydendron arboretum | Excellent pollinator attractor |
| Flowering Dogwood | Cornus florida | Beauty, fruit for birds |
| Cornelian Cherry* | Cornus mas | Same Cornus genus as flowering dogwood. Very tart cherry |
| Eastern Redbud | Cercis canadensis var. canadensis | Flowers and seed pods are edible. |
| Pawpaw | Asimina triloba | Largest native fruit in North America. About the size of a mango, tastes like a custardy banana with an astringent afternote. You either love them or you hate them. Found in moist lowlands. Primary host plant for the zebra swallowtail butterfly. |
Vines |
||
| Muscadines | Vitis rotundifolia | Delicious grapes |
| Passion Fruit* | Passiflora Incarnata | Fragrant fruit and stellar flowers. Native on forest edges Host plant to the Gulf Fritillary, Variegated Fritillary, Julia Heliconian and Zebra Heliconian caterpillars. |
Shrubs |
||
| Hearts a bursting | Eunonymous americana | Excellent deer fodder (and therefore goat fodder. Goats and deer are in the same family) |
| Sweet shrub | Calycanthus florida | Fragrant flower. Can be used for potpourri |
| Viburnum | Viburnum | This is the listing in the reference material. See below for the actual edible species. |
| Highbush Cranberries* | Viburnum triloba | Note that this is not the same as regular cranberries. Also, most viburnums are mildly poisonous to people, but Highbush Cranberries are not. |
| sweetleaf, horse-sugar, yellowwood | Simplocos tinctoria | Tea from leaves. Host to butterflies. |
| Blueberry, cranberry, huckleberry, lingonberry | Vaccinium | All edible. Some may prefer colder/warmer/drier/wetter habitats than others. Research before planting. |
*Not from original natural community. I added it because the genus or family matched the listing in the original resource, and I knew it provided excellent food.
Kirsten Holland Robertson is a regenerative farmer and SWCD Educator in Greenville, SC. In addition to growing her own vegetables and raising her own sheep and goats in a dynamic permaculture based, holistically managed agroforestry silvopasture system, Kirsten manages the lively Facebook ReGenerative Grazing community group. After finding Vail and joining the Grazing Power community, she has joined our team, partnering with SimpleSoilSolutions.com to create holistic grazing and soil building mentorship programs, and offers us support. Look for RegenaGraze.com.
Hi Kirsten,
Thank you so much for this how-to-do! However, a couple of questions. I live in the Netherlands, so a different continent, a different climate, different soil and a different natural ecosystem (not that there’s much left of our natural ecosystems). What climate zone are you in? And what kind of soil are you on? Kind regards from Holland (where your ancestors might originate, if I judge by your surname 😉 ) ,
Geertje Korf
Great piece, Kirsten! Thanks for all the info and inspiration! We share many of the same plants in the Blue Ridge area of Maryland. We also appreciate the abundance of spicebush (Lindera benzoin), a lovely understory shrub with all parts edible and aromatic. Another one that attracts its own butterfly. This list of books put together by the Maryland Native Plant Society may be useful to others in the eastern U.S. – https://mdflora.org/publications/booklist.html